Posts Tagged "snow"

Today we are going to make a tutorial on frosty text effect. While it’s still cold and wintry outside, I thought it would be high time to supply some more wintry text effects for our readers.

So, begin with making  a new canvas of any desired size, and for now please use plain white (#ffffff) background. Later on we will add a custom texture or picture to the background, but for now, it will be much easier for your to work and see all the effects against the white canvas.

Select the typing tool and using Arial Rounded MT Bold font, set to “sharp”, use very big letters, say over 100. For the purpose of the tutorial we used 115, however if you choose to download out PSD, you will see that our original canvas consists from letters with font size 195.

Type your word.

The main part of this Photoshop tutorial consists from precise application of the layer styles as we are going to work with custom designed curved, textures (default) and a lot of other features. Let’s begin and please try to follow us throughout the tutorial if you wish to achieve the same result.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles, and start off with “Drop Shadow” options. Apply the settings as you see below. For the shadow here we used a very dark blue, almost black color: #003059. However, feel free to chose a different hue if you are going to work with a light background canvas afterward.

Switch the tab to Inner Shadow. For Inner shadow we used a gray-blue color #0a7eaf, which will nicely complement the overall wintry feel of this text. Please pay attention to the fact that we are using “Noise” here at 3%, to add to the grainy / snowy effect.

Switch to Outer Glow and apply a very dark outer glow effect, we used #0a1732 with 35% which gave us light yet dark outlined shade.

Working our way down (in Photoshop..), to Inner Glow settings. This one gives our text effect the feeling of light and reflection, yet this is not going to be a direct spotlight, rather a cold reflection as you are used to seeing when looking on ice. Also here please note that we have applied a 17%, very visible noise.

Add Bevel and Emboss settings for extremely curved effect.

I get a lot of emails from beginners who want to learn the advanced tutorials that involve glow and sparkles effects, yet they are not very familiar with the pen tool and other tools that require a little bit of experience and knowledge, even if these tools seem basic to most of you. So, I decided to put up a tutorial that will allow beginners who are not yet familiar with Photoshop, to get started, make sparkles, glow and twirls without mastering the pen tools skills any deeper.

We will be making this tutorial, which will only be constructed from 3 images, 1 shape and a lot of basic Photoshop commands that will allow us to make a really cool composition… or shall I say — “hot”..? Please feel free to leave a comment or submit your result to our Flickr group.

Let’s get started. Photos used (All licensed under the Creative Commons for commercial use):

Step 1:

Crop the girl out of the image; it does not really matter hat method you use to chop the edges and background away, as long as you have the edges defined. We are not going to get into great details here as cropping is an ultra basic technique, all I’d say is that I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to roughly extract the lady from the background. Don’t worry about the rough edges if you have any, we will be using a lot of filters so any mishaps will disappear later on.

Step 2:

Place the lady over the winter landscape and desize, according to your needs. We scaled the image down to about 60% and placed it in the middle of the canvas.

Step 3

Now we need to make the girl’s image look like it’s blending in organically,  and the easiest way to do so is to add a shadow that falls on the snow. Select the woman’s layer, and once you made the selection, create a New Layer underneath the girl’s image layer, and fill that selection with solid black color #000000.

Step 4

Now we are going to transform the selection, while the layer is still selected, press Ctrl + T and lay the shadow down, just the way you see in the illustration. Make sure that the shadow begins from lady’s legs, because when you start transforming, the shadow will move from under her legs and the only way to fix this is by dragging the bottom corners and adjusting them to “fit” to the main object.

Okay, as you could guess, we are going to make a cool, snowy and even arctic photo effect. This is not going to require any advanced skills even though the result looks complicated and professional. All you need to do is follow this tutorial step by step and  in the end you will get the same, or even better result as we have here in our presentation.

Start off by selecting a photo of a girl or boy you are willing to freeze. You can use your own or a stock photo, our image comes from sxc.hu so if you like, use this one as well.

We are going to work a lot with duplicated layers so please pay attention when I say you should duplicate your existing layer. So… Please duplicate the layer. Select the upper one and go to Image >> Adjustments >> Gradient Map. Use one of the default gradients (dark blue to white), and if it makes your image look like a negative, check the “Reverse” box. Otherwise just click OK.

While your blueish layer is selected, go to layers panel and set its setting to “Color”, then reduce the Opacity of the layer to about 73%. If you see that your image is too dark or too blue, you can reduce the opacity even more, BUT… at your own risk, okay?

Now, what characterizes a cold face in snow? Pale lips, eyebrows covered in snow… we are doing to achieve this effect extremely easy. In your layers panel select the first layer (the colorful one) and using the “Dodge Tool” with soft 40px brush, go over the lips area and then carefully over the eyebrows to make them